This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Garbage in — in fine form, for band comeback

Pop

Garbage

Not Your Kind of People (STUNVOLUME/Universal)

(out of 4)

When a thoroughly disenchanted Garbage called it a day indefinitely mid-tour seven years ago, it looked like a fairly wise course of action.

ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

After a couple of massive records — including a truly classic entry in the post-grunge sweepstakes with 1995's Garbage — the band had audibly lost the plot by 2005's Bleed Like Me. At least the transatlantic foursome had the good sense to walk away from it all, instead of running it completely into the ground, even if that meant watching a legion of followers from Ladytron to Lady Gaga picking up its stylish slack from the sidelines.

Seven years in dry dock turns out to be exactly what Scottish siren (and sometime TV Terminator) Shirley Manson and her producer pals Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker needed because Not Your Kind of People is the strongest Garbage album since its first.

The band's sound is essentially unchanged, but that only reinforces how ahead of their time tunes such tech-savvy radio staples as “Stupid Girl” and “Push It” were. And if it ain't broke, anyway, don't fix it. Openers “Automatic Systematic Habit” — which pays homage to the opening bars of Cream's “White Room” before erupting into an industrial-strength “I won't be the other woman” kiss-off with a humungous bubblegum chorus — and “Big Bright World” are as hammeringly plush and melodic as anything Garbage has ever recorded, and the album barely ebbs from that standard during its entire 40-odd minute running time.

It's reasonably diverse within the Garbage framework, too. “Blood for Poppies” puts a mild dub spin on a wah-wah-ing mash-up of Laura Branigan's “Self Control” and the Smashing Pumpkins' “Today” (which Vig, of course, produced along with Nirvana's Nevermind and Sonic Youth's Dirty back in the day); the title track is languid, '60s-leaning psychedelia; “Man on a Wire” is a punk-rock tantrum. ; and the pointedly My Bloody Valentine-ish “Control” and “Felt” dive headlong into shoegazer nostalgia, the latter recycling a few bars of “Stupid Girl” along the way.

Surprisingly compulsive listening. Guess we needed Garbage to come back for us to realize how much we missed 'em.

Top track: “Automatic Systematic Habit.” If this isn't a hit, I dunno what is anymore.

Ben Rayner

ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

Jazz

Arturo Sandoval

Dear Diz (Every Day I Think of You) (Concord Jazz)

In Dear Diz, fellow trumpeter Arturo Sandoval (who defected to the United States in 1990 with Dizzy Gillespie's help) underlines Gillespie's towering achievements as a composer, band leader and virtuoso.

Diz altered jazz trumpeting forever: his machine-gun melodic outbursts, rhythmic innovations and pinched intonations are celebrated by Sandoval's own throughout the album. For a younger generation, Dear Diz works nicely as a primer about Gillespie-the-composer, with ever-familiar tunes like “Salt Peanuts (Mani Salado)” or “A Night In Tunisia.”

Yet veteran TV composer/arranger Nan Schwarz fashioned an arrangement for “Con Alma (With Soul)” that recasts Gillespie's music in quasi-classical fashion. It's a raw moment rivalled only by Sandoval singing “Every Day I Think of You,” his composition written for Gillespie.

Peter Goddard

Classical

ANGELA HEWITT

Schumann Piano Concerto (Hyperion)

Ottawa's mayor has declared this to be Angela Hewitt Week, in honour of a native daughter who has become one of the world's most respected pianists. The occasion is an excuse for the release of a new album featuring Robert Schumann's A minor Piano Concerto, Op. 54.

Hewitt is a performer with a clear style that's highly articulated and superbly polished. It makes for extraordinary Bach, but it's a love-or-hate proposition with Romantic repertoire.

This is a technically flawless, dynamically colourful performance of one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. But it lacks warmth at its core, despite the wonderful efforts of Finnish star conductor Hannu Lintu and the golden-sounding strings and woodwinds German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin.

Hewitt fills out the disc with two shorter works by Schumann. There's a lot of fine flash in the music here, but my preference is for a bit more depth.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com